A review by readincolour
The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth by Karen Branan

2.0

The writer got bogged down in family history and who was related to whom. It made it difficult to keep up with what was going on. I understand that it was personal for her as it's told from her point of view as the granddaughter of a sheriff during this incident, but the story could have been better told. There's a lot of going back and forth between present day and the past and it only gets really interesting when she begins to interview people that were alive when the actual lynching took place.

There's a real desire on her part to assuage her white guilt, but it does a disservice to the overall story. The focus of the story shouldn't have been on how she feels about knowing how cowardly & racist her grandfather, mother, aunts, etc. are or how she found out she wasn't as liberal as she thought she was. The story of the actual victims in the story are glossed over. I was reading this for their story, not hers.

Since the name of the book is The Family Tree, and she spent so much time delving into her white family history, I would have liked her to spend as much time talking about her black relatives instead of glossing over meeting them at a reunion.

I had high expectations for this book. Unfortunately, it came up short.